mjhjmtu

I have accounts on a number of different machines for testing a couple libraries I contribute to. Some of the machines are owned by others (like the GCC compile farm), and I'd like to keep them tidy.

I want to setup a .bash_logout script that performs a make clean upon exit if I am in a particular directory. The directory requirement drops out of multiple SSH sessions. If I am building/testing in one session, I don't want a separate session logout cleaning the artifacts. That is, exit from $HOME/libfoo performs a clean; while exit from $HOME does not.

I understand the basics, but its not clear to me how robust this is:

# $HOME/.bash_logout

if [ "$PWD" = "$HOME/libfoo" ]; then
 make clean 1>/dev/null 2>&1
fi

Are there any problems with using $PWD during logout? Are there any other problems that I might have missed?

Is your intent to execute the script only on log-out?

From man bash:

When a login shell exits, bash reads and executes commands from the file ~/.bash_logout, if it exists.

Only on exit of a bash login shell.

If you intend to run an script on every shell close, use trap (see man bash):

trap /u1/myuser/on_exit_script.sh EXIT

Add it to .bashrc or some other that works for you.

Also, as the script will execute on exit, the $PWD will be the one active on exit, which may or may not be the same as when the shell was started. If you need to do something on the $PWD that was in use on exit, then yes, this test:

if [ "$PWD" = "$HOME/libfoo" ]; then

Should work.

I like many of my shell scripts portable and shell-agnostic, so I prefer trapping EXIT over using the bash-specific .bash_logout method. And for a truly self-contained solution it's best not having to modify or create .bash_logout, nor rely on a separate script to be run on exit. So for minimal impact on foreign systems, my preferred method is to drop a custom login profile in place whenever I start working on a system, and having that same profile clean up itself and any helper scripts or config files it creates. I create a shell function "bye" in the script that performs said cleanup, and register it for auto-cleanup on logout, whether intentional or by simple disconnection, via:

trap bye EXIT

I'm not sure how to do that through a bash_logout, though you could write a little script called exit that you'd put in /usr/local/bin/ with the kind of code that you put in your question, so that when you type exit in your console it'd do what you want if you are in the specific directory